Looking ahead to 2017, faculty at the University of Alabama offer predictions about what the new year will hold as part of the 36th annual Educated Guesses.

The prognostications were dominated by predictions about the Donald Trump's presidency, with the faculty experts weighing in on his Cabinet picks, his relationship with Congress, his tweets and his campaign promises. The president-elect is scheduled to be inaugurated as the 45th nation's president on Jan. 20.

Trump might have trouble with his legislative agenda despite a Republican-controlled Congress, one expert predicts. His Cabinet picks potentially represent a challenge to the conventional civilian leadership of the military and security services and signal a shift toward market-driven education strategies, the expert predicts. Trump's picks for the U.S. Supreme Court could weaken freedom of the press protections, and President Trump will likely continue his use of Twitter, according to the predictors. Though the repeal of the Affordable Care Act has been an popular idea among Republicans, Obamacare is likely to only undergo subtle changes, according to the predictors.

The postmortems about the North Carolina governor’s race so far have been incorrectly oversimplified to “HB2 was toxic” and “Pat McCrory lost because of social issues”.

As usual, the prevailing narrative is wrong — HB2’s toxicity has been greatly overstated. Just two of the 89 GOP state legislators who voted for HB2 were voted out of office. Surely, if HB2 were as toxic as claimed, wouldn’t more Republicans have lost their jobs?

In a think piece at The Federalist, Terry Schilling, executive director at American Principles Project, explains exactly why McCrory lost:

“From the very beginning, the Left sought to strategically demonize HB2 over economics, not over the bill’s actual “bathroom” provision, which North Carolina voters generally supported. Instead of fighting on the issue’s merits, which was likely to result in political failure, progressives enlisted the help of elite corporations, sports leagues, and Hollywood celebrities to punish North Carolina families by pulling economic development from the state.

"They launched corporate boycotts. They took away the NBA All-Star game. They cancelled sold-out concerts. Then, after ensuring the economic pain would be as excruciating as possible for residents of North Carolina, Cooper and the Democrats blamed McCrory. The Left essentially staged an economic crisis in order to win an election. Nasty."

Schilling pointed out that the North Carolina race gives conservatives a glimpse into how the Left will fight in the future:

"We know the Left’s strategy now. We know how they are going to handle religious freedom and gender issues. We know they will collude with their corporate and entertainment allies in an effort to punish those who hold traditional values. We know they will likely have the fundraising advantage that comes from being the party of elite millionaires and billionaires. We know that, when they can’t win on the merits of an issue, they plan to hit us where it hurts — our checkbooks.

"Despite all this, we know we can win. Their shameful bullying strategy backfired across the nation on election night, especially in “Rust Belt” states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and yes, even to some degree in North Carolina.

"Most Americans don’t agree with Democrats that grown men should be using the same public facilities as young girls or that religious schools and charities should be shut down if they stand up to radical LGBT bullies. Democrats know this, which is why they desperately staged an economic crisis in North Carolina to win a governor’s race by less than one-tenth of one percentage point. That’s hardly a victory. We can win — and we will win — as long as we are willing to fight.

In one of the first surveys after the 2016 presidential election, the Pew Research Center asked voters to weigh in on what grade Donald Trump (and others) should receive, what he should do first, and whether they will give him a chance to succeed.

Among white evangelicals voters—one of Trump’s strongest demographics—one in five (20%) graded the president-elect’s conduct during the campaign at an A, while a plurality (31%) gave him a B, according to new Pew Research Center data provided to CT.

Meanwhile, more than a quarter of white evangelical voters gave him a failing grade of a D or F. Trump’s overall campaign grade is the lowest among any presidential candidate—winning or losing—since Pew began collecting data in 1988. more

History will condemn our inaction on abortion

As the Allied forces marched across Europe in 1945, our troops were shocked upon discovering the concentration camps. Our boys had seen killing, but nothing like that. The camps were death factories, where millions were slaughtered with assembly-line efficiency.

Holding pens. Gas chambers. Ovens. And in a particularly ghoulish touch, piles of the remnants the Nazis found useful: shoes, eyeglasses.

When Allied commanders demanded explanations from locals (camp overseers had fled), they either claimed ignorance or said they were only following their government's laws.

Generals like George Patton would hear none of it. Obedience to an unjust law, or ignorance of its true effect, is no excuse for inaction. He marched the townspeople through the camps and forced them to witness – to see, to smell – the holocaust that had been happening on a daily basis only a few miles from their homes. more

If three additional liberal and moderate vacancies occur in the next four years, the Court could stand 7-2 conservative for decades to come.

By James D. Zirin

What immediately crossed my mind with Donald Trump’s stunning upset victory was not what this would mean for Obamacare, bank regulation, our global alliances, or whether the United States will impose a 45 percent tariff on China-made goods or even build a wall across our border with Mexico. I thought of the US Supreme Court. A Court seat has been empty since the death of rock-ribbed conservative Justice Antonin Scalia last February since the Republican Senate refused even to hold hearings on Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

Currently there are four conservatives and four liberals left on the Court. Ginsburg, the eldest, is 82; Kennedy, 80; and Breyer, 78, the average retirement age for justices. Many have criticized Ginsburg for not retiring earlier so that Obama could have appointed Garland or a younger justice in her stead, and the ideological structure would be preserved. With three additional vacancies possibly created by the retirement of the elder justices, Trump’s appointments in the next four years may well shape constitutional law for a generation.

As Governor of Indiana, Vice President-elect Mike Pence was so enamored of Scalia, who died last February, that he renamed an interstate highway I-69 the “Antonin Scalia Throughway.” In accepting Trump’s designation as his running mate, Pence said: “And where Donald Trump will appoint justices like the late Antonin Scalia, who will uphold our Constitution, Hillary Clinton will appoint Supreme Court justices who will legislate from the bench, abandon the sanctity of life, and rewrite our Second Amendment,” as though the conservative justices did not “legislate from the bench” in the Shelby County voting-rights case and the campaign-finance case Citizens United, which both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders vowed to overturn. more